Scientific Explanation Why Some People are Lucky
enlogica.com
4
Oct
2011
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Years ago while I was studying Psychology at the University of Washington, I heard about a research study that explored why some people are luckier than others. Dr Richard Wiseman published a paper called The Luck Factor which explored the phenomenon of why some people are consistently more luck than others. In this study, a group of participants were asked to count the number of pictures in a news paper. Some found the answer within a couple seconds while others took over 2 minutes. But why? It turns out there was a large advertisement taken out on page 2 that read “Stop counting the answer is 43. Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $250.”. So while some were hard at work counting the number of photos, others read this message, saw the opportunity and stopped.
In a prior study by Daniel J Simmons, a group of participants were asked to watch this video. In fact, try watching the video first, before reading the rest of this blog post to really get the point:
In this video, participants are asked to count the number of times the team members with white shirts past the basketball. In the middle of the video, a man in a gorilla suit walks in, stops, beats his chest, then slowly walks across the video. Once you know to look for it, it is incredibly obvious and hard to miss. But most who has never watched the video, never see it. The effect is something called Inattentional Blindness.
From all of this, it would seem that most people get so caught up with solving the problems they’ve been assigned by life or at work, that their mind is too pre-occupied to even see the opportunities in front of them. But according to Dr Wiseman it is more than just that. He identified that four traits of the habitually luck individual:
1. Observant of Chance Opportunity – As said above, some people are just more aware of opportunity, but are also more open to those opportunities and cease upon them as they arise.
2. Use intuition to make decisions – Lucky people tend to following those intuition and trust that good things will occur by doing so. They’re not getting bogged down with spreadsheets and overly composed logical explanations.
3. Power of Intention – According The Secret, amazing things happen because we believe it will and we manifest it through the actions that come out of believing it will be. Dr Wiseman also talks about a similar effect here. So its not just *seeing* the opportunity, it is having enough faith in your intuition enough to pursue it.
4. Resilience – Finally he said that even in the face of bad luck, lucky people tend to handle it much better. They tend to see how things “could have been worse” and feel grateful that it was not, rather than expecting perfection and shutting down which it was not achieved. This helps to keep the lucky person open to future opportunity and still willing to follow their intuition next time.
I first heard all of this perhaps a decade or more ago, but as I read it again, it resonates as true for me, after having read so many other things about entrepreneurship and success in the last few years. And the good news is that there is hope if you’re not one of the lucky ones; according to Dr Wiseman’s research, it is possible to train yourself to be more open and responsive to chance opportunity. Clearly though, some people are just naturally better at this than others. Also clearly to me, certain jobs train you negatively against this way of being. I personally find that after spending a day programming, I’m not feeling particularly open or receptive to chance opportunity. Equally clear however, is that we must try to retain this inner voice and work with it.
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http://enlogica.com/entrepreneurship/scientific-explanation-for-why-some-people-are-lucky/
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